By Clint Thompson
A prolonged dry spell in South Georgia is impacting the region’s fall vegetable producers.
Sam Watson, located in Colquitt County Georgia, discussed the impacts that growers like himself are seeing amid hot and dry weather conditions.
“It’s getting pretty tough. No. 1, we’re running low on water in some places. No. 2, the whitefly pressure has just been awful, as bad as I’ve seen in probably four or five falls. It’s been a while since we’ve had one this bad,” Watson said. “I think some of that is just due to all the dry weather, amongst some other things. With cheaper row crop commodity prices, row crop guys hadn’t been spraying quite as much and then just the dry weather, we hadn’t had any rain or wind to knock the whiteflies down.”
According to the Oct. 2 release of the U.S. Drought Monitor, severe and moderate drought conditions are observed throughout South Georgia, especially in the southwest part of the state. Severe conditions are seen as far west as Seminole and Early counties, stretching eastward to Clinch, Ware and Coffee counties and northward to Tift, Worth and Dougherty counties.
The adverse weather conditions have only added to another challenging year for vegetable growers.
“We’ve got a lot of stuff going on and again all of the markets are bad, on top of everything else. It’s hard to keep pounding squash for whiteflies; being a cheap squash market, cheap cucumber market, cheap pepper market, cheap eggplant market,” Watson said. “Everything’s cheap, but we’re spending more.”